Travel writing has moved from metaphors to hashtags.
If you read the airfares in the Miami Herald Travel section you see that one airline, identified by the letters NK, has consistently lower fares from Fort Lauderdale than almost any airline to the same destination from Miami. Checking the codes, you see that NK is Spirit Airline.
Last month, I flew Spirit for the first time, to Boston. At check-in I was asked to pay $50 for my carry-on bag. It was the only bag I had. I paid $50 for the same bag on the flight home. When I complained about the deception to the gentlemen at the gate, I was told that, had I purchased my ticket on the Spirit website, I would have been told about the extra fee, which increased my total cost by almost half, and made flying Spirit more expensive (who doesn't travel with a bag?) than other airlines. And of course, there is nothing on the airfare charts about this hidden fee.
This past Sunday I spent a few minutes wondering what the NK stands for and then I decided: Not kosher.
I recently met a man who told me that, some years ago, traveling in Tasmania, he was asked if he was Canadian. This surprised him - he was from Ohio - and he asked the man what made him think he was from Canada.
The Aussie explained that, when it came to English-speakers with North American accents, he always asked if they were Canadian first, even though the odds were greater that they were American. The reason, he said, was that Canadians get offended if mistaken for Americans, while Americans are never offended when mistaken for Canadians.
In 1998, when I was the travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, I wrote a column, "Of course, we only buy it for the travel," the conceit of which was to regard the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue as a travel magazine. I claimed that it educated young Americans about the world, and had probably given Bill Clinton early inspiration for his later involvement in foreign as well as domestic affairs.
So I was not at all surprised yesterday when this year's swimsuit issue arrived with a full-page ad for the Travel Channel's "Sports Illustrated: The Making of Swimsuit 2013."
We took our friend Elizabeth (visiting from New York) down to Miami last Saturday and before dinner she noted that I was a finicky eater. I took exception to the charge.
Considering how food now dominates the world of travel, it was worse than being accused of having no sense of direction. Thanks to TV, travel writers can now mouth platitudes (they’re almost encouraged to do so) as long as they’re enthusiastically downing some hideous foodstuff that may or may not be indicative of what the local population eats.
Anyway, in my defense, I explained to Elizabeth that I am simply not a big meat eater. I left out – assuming it was understood – that I can’t stand organs or offal.
Later it occurred to me that if I just gave up meat, nobody would think of me as a finicky eater. They would just say, respectfully, that I was a vegetarian.
Every travel writer who writes about the United States (I’ve already excluded a number of travel writers, including, regrettably, some American ones) does so in the shadow of Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America. Quoting Tocqueville in articles about the States became such a cliché that Calvin Trillin, when he was filing regular reports from around the country for The New Yorker, started a small club of reporters who vowed never to mention Tocqueville in a story.
But I would argue that writers who go out to look for America (and that includes songwriters) owe a greater debt to the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s than they do to the French political thinker. The Project’s American Guide Series – which covered all 48 states, plus the territories of Alaska and Puerto Rico – showed that every area of the country was worthy of attention, that Arkansas was as deserving of a book as California.
It was not obeisance to geographical relativism but rather a recognition of the infinite richness of the United States. The Guide’s belief in the value of the marginal, the beauty of the unsung – under threat today from the supremacy of the popular (the curse of the Internet) – infused James Morris’s Coast to Coast, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Jonathan Raban’s Hunting Mister Heartbreak. Its greatest champion was Jack Kerouac who, heading back to New York after travels in the West, found grandeur in the Susquehanna River.